The Brodies voting is well underway — and it has turned out to be an exciting year after all!! There are already some clear winners, but also some tight races, such as: “Best Mormon History Blog/Channel/Podcast,” “Best Life Journey Piece,” “Best Response to Apologetics,” “Best Discussion on Gender,” and “Best Philosophical/Theological Discussion.”

There is so much great stuff this year — I really hope that (like me!) you’re taking advantage of this opportunity to discover some great content that you may have missed! You have one more week!!

My profound apologies for all of the embarrassing errors this time, specifically: accidentally naming all of the polls “Brodies 2018” and accidentally neglecting to make a poll for “Best Exmormon Reddit Contributor” — plus a bunch of other obvious typos. It’s as if I was drunk while preparing the polls or something! (note: I neither confirm nor deny rumors of my being drunk while preparing the polls, but I will say that it is an incredibly boring task, just sayin’ 😉 )

Additionally, today I finished my first pass at updating the MAA website to reflect our new status as an indie publisher!! 😀 Check it out!

We’re still working on the “about” page (clearly), but I hope to have it in a better state next weekend.

Yay, it’s time to vote!!! Thanks for all of the great nominations — we have got a great crop this year!! And I thought it was going to be a slow year! Thanks especially to all of those who indulged my last-minute request for poems!

OK, folks, I wanted to have the polls up today, but I ran into a bit of a glitch: Two people nominated The War Goes On, by Clarence Tong, as best poem, but…. I don’t have a third poem nomination to make this category viable. And I don’t want to just grab whatever random thing at the last minute — there’s got to be at least one more LDS interest poem published in 2017 that deserves to be nominated! So you have one more week for nominations, and I’d like to see some poetry. 😀

Here are the nominations as they stand. Please comment if anything is missing or if you have corrections. I will probably split up some of the larger categories when making the polls, but here’s what we have so far:

How to nominate: Just post your nominations as comment to this thread, but please include links to the works you nominate. It’s best to post one nomination per comment — to avoid your nomination ending up in the spam filter — but if your nomination comment ends up in the spam filter, please email me (chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com) and I will fish it out.

And don’t forget the nomination guidelines:

Please nominate as many people, books, blogs, sites, podcasts, songs, articles, images, etc. as you want. However, please do not nominate more than two individual works by any one author/artist.

You are encouraged to nominate your own works. No one knows better than you do which pieces were your best. No more than two, though.

Please nominate works that first appeared during 2017.

Please try to nominate people and works that have some connection with Mormonism (eg. either the work touches on Mormonism, or the author is a current or former Mormon and/or is an active participant in our community).

A category must have at least three nominations in order to be included in the voting and awards phase.

You may suggest your own categories — however please do it as early as possible in the nominations process, to give others plenty of time to add nominations in your proposed categories.

Any other proposed changes to the categories or to the guidelines are welcome — feel free to discuss it in the comments.

Savannah has been an inspiration to many people, she made an appearance at Love Loud, and she even won the popular vote for Utahn of the year! And now she’s the William Law X-Mormon of the Year for 2017 — Congratulations, Savannah!!

As usual, we’re also doing the Brodie Awards — a fun little yearly activity intended to give some extra recognition and signal boost to the best LDS-interest content published/posted during the past year.

Unfortunately, this has been a bit of a slow year so far for the Brodie awards — in part because I haven’t had as much time to keep things lively here at MSP since taking my new job. I’m glad to see some people are still having fun with this and have started leaving their nominations!

Now I’m going to do a first-pass of organizing this year’s categories, adding some nominations of my own, and pointing out which categories need more nominations. Remember that each category needs a least three nominations to continue on to the voting and awards rounds. The nomination process will continue for two more weeks and then we will begin voting. Here we go!

How to nominate: Just post your nominations as comment to this thread, but please include links to the works you nominate. If your nomination comment ends up in the spam filter, please email me (chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com) and I will fish it out. (Also note that if you post each nomination as a separate comment, they’re less likely to get flagged as spam.)

And don’t forget the nomination guidelines:

Please nominate as many people, books, blogs, sites, podcasts, songs, articles, images, etc. as you want. However, please do not nominate more than two individual works by any one author/artist.

You are encouraged to nominate your own works. No one knows better than you do which pieces were your best. No more than two, though.

Please nominate works that first appeared during 2017.

Please try to nominate people and works that have some connection with Mormonism (eg. either the work touches on Mormonism, or the author is a current or former Mormon and/or is an active participant in our community).

A category must have at least three nominations in order to be included in the voting and awards phase.

You may suggest your own categories — however please do it as early as possible in the nominations process, to give others plenty of time to add nominations in your proposed categories.

Any other proposed changes to the categories or to the guidelines are welcome — feel free to discuss it in the comments.

The nominations will be open until mid-January, 2018, depending on my schedule. I will finalize the dates and categories and add my own nominations a few days before the nominations close and voting begins.

Now, it’s also time to start on the Brodie Awards!! The Brodie Awards are a fun little yearly activity intended to give some extra recognition and signal boost to the best LDS-interest content published/posted during the past year. This is your opportunity to review your favorite pieces, find out about great works you may have missed, and even promote your own work!

As usual, I will start by posting a list of suggested categories (from last year), but the precise list of award categories depends on your suggestions. Please feel free to browse the sidebar for ideas on award categories we’ve used in the past for ideas. Below the suggested categories, I will post the nomination guidelines.

Year-long awards for people and groups:

Best New Blog/Channel/Podcast

Best Humor/Satire Blog/Channel/Podcast

Best Scripture Study Blog/Channel/Podcast

Best Mormon History Blog/Channel/Podcast

Best LDS-Church-Info Site

Best LDS-interest Discussion Forum

Best Exmormon Reddit Contributor

Best faithful-perspective Mormon Blog

Awards for Individual Works:

Best LDS-Interest Book (Fiction)

Best LDS-Interest Book (General non-fiction)

Best LDS-Interest Book (Narrative non-fiction)

Best LDS-Interest Song

Best Poem

Best LDS-Interest Comic or Image

Best Mormon-Themed Meme

Best Post Title

Funniest Humor Piece

Funniest Parody

Best Metaphor/Analogy/Allegory

Best From the Pulpit Sermon

Most Poignant Personal Story

Best Exit Story

Best Original Research Regarding Mormonism

Best Leak or Personal Recording

Best LDS Church Watch Piece

Best Response to Apologetics

Best LDS-Culture Piece

Best History Piece

Best Scripture Study Piece

Most Insightful Commentary on the CoJCoL-dS

Best Philosophical/Theological Discussion

Best Podcast Episode

Best Short Media Presentation

And here are the nomination guidelines:

Please nominate as many people, books, blogs, sites, podcasts, songs, articles, images, etc. as you want. However, please do not nominate more than two individual works by any one author/artist.

You are encouraged to nominate your own works. No one knows better than you do which pieces were your best. No more than two, though.

Please nominate works that first appeared during 2017.

Please try to nominate people and works that have some connection with Mormonism (eg. either the work touches on Mormonism, or the author is a current or former Mormon and/or is an active participant in our community).

A category must have at least three nominations in order to be included in the voting and awards phase.

You may suggest your own categories — however please do it as early as possible in the nominations process, to give others plenty of time to add nominations in your proposed categories.

Any other proposed changes to the categories or to the guidelines are welcome — feel free to discuss it in the comments.

The nominations will be open until mid-January, 2018, depending on my schedule. I will finalize the dates and categories and add my own nominations a few days before the nominations close and voting begins.

How to nominate: Just post your nominations as comment to this thread, but please include links to the works you nominate. If your nomination comment ends up in the spam filter, please email me (chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com) and I will fish it out.

Hey folks — it’s that time of year again! Time to decide which X-Mormon made the biggest splash in 2017!!

As I said a few weeks ago, it seems like the “Mormon Moment” is over. It seems like there haven’t been as many high-profile excommunications or original public demonstrations during General Conference in 2017 as there have been in the past. So X-Mormons have been out there doing some cool other stuff instead!

Of course there are always people doing some Mormon-related things that get them into the news as well. For example, Sam Youngstarted a petition to protect youth from sexually-oriented “worthiness” interviews. (Note: he might still be an active/believing/participating member of the CoJC-L-dS — and I think we’ve decided that that would disqualify him…? — so I’ll hold off on officially nominating him until getting more info on this point.)

So, who would you like to see nominated? Did you see an excommunication that should have gotten more coverage?

Note: The William Law X-Mormon of the Year award 2017 is for real-life actions that X-Mormons performed in 2017. It’s not intended as an award for content. So if you know of someone who made the best Mo-related film or published an amazing book or article, performed a song, etc. — save those nominations for the Brodie Awards that will be coming up in a couple of weeks.